Second Chances
by Cyberwolf
Summary: They never had the chance to be children. Neji does something to remedy that.
1. Never A Child

* * *

_Shinobi are not meant to have children. They are wed to their battles and their jutsu, and there is little room left in lives lived on blade-edges for the softness and clinging neediness of childhood._

* * *

She's born literally on the battlefield, her kunoichi mother muffling her labor-pain screams with a filthy, blood-soaked rag tied round her mouth (it had once been part of her teammate's uniform – but he had no need for it now). Her hands are white-knuckled, clenched around her katana, praying in between the waves of unimaginable pain that her team can keep the enemy occupied long enough for her to complete this ordeal.

When her baby is born, she claps a hand over its mouth to stop its yelling, smearing the reddish birth-fluids over the tiny face. Gasping with the remnants of pain and exhaustion, she ties the umbilical cord, then snatches up a kunai from where it lies embedded in the chest of an enemy-nin, and uses it to saw away at the thin thread of flesh between herself and her newborn. It is a testament to her blade-skills how neat the cut is.

And then an enemy-nin is leaping at them, shrilling a Kumo battlecry, and she fights with her wailing child pressed to her breast. She ignores a body shouting for rest, screaming with pain, and delivers the killing-blow with the same kunai she used to cut her baby's umbilical cord. The arc-spurt of blood from the nin's severed throat splatters across the baby's face, a brighter thicker red than the bloody fluids of her birthing, and instinctively she licks her lips.

Her first nourishment in this world is the blood of a slain enemy.

* * *

_Shinobi had no time to have children. And when they did, their children had no time to be children._

* * *

The first clear memory he has is of his father – his father, and training. They are in a dojo, and the wood is smooth and warm beneath his bare, soft feet. The roof and walls of the simple but well-built structure seem to stretch into infinity, to his baby-eyes perspective. Early-morning sunlight glows dimly behind the rice-paper doors.

Hizashi is teaching his tiny son the very rudiments of Jyuuken. His hands are gentle and his voice is soft, but that does not change the fact that he is showing Neji the beginnings of a killing dance.

* * *

_Shinobi have short lives. They have little time to be children, and they're lucky if they have any time at all to be parents. _

* * *

The day his father dies is the day something inside him dies. Everything he knows of security and warmth and love is snatched away from him, and his entire world is left bereft. He grieves in the Hyuuga way – silently, without tears, standing straight and tall and proud. He grieves as an adult does.

She cannot remember her mother. She's told that her mother died in hospital after a mission, that she died with honor, that she's a heroine to the Village. Her name is scribed on the Memorial Stone. But she was too young to remember, and she never visits the Stone, and she does not use the name her mother gave her.

* * *

_Shinobi do not – cannot – tolerate weakness. A child with only a child's powers would be at the mercy of any passing shinobi – and shinobi have little mercy. _

* * *

The Konoha Academy is one of the best-guarded locations in the whole of the Hidden Village. This is not only because, as the Hokage so often says, the children are the future of the Village. It is not even _mostly _because of that.

It is because they mustn't allow outsiders to see what goes on in those blocky, square-walled rooms and long, well-worn corridors. They wouldn't understand – no one who hadn't gone through his own version of the Academy would understand, and they would make a very great fuss.

For civilian children aren't expected to know the things shinobi children know (and they aren't called children, they're called genin or pre-genin but not children, not usually) and they aren't expected to have the calm and reserve and self-competent independence shinobi children have.

Civilians wouldn't understand the necessity of teaching nine-year-olds how to kill from cover, or from the open, or while pretending to be someone's friend; they would not understand encouraging small girls to raise poison to a high art. They wouldn't understand a crowd of children dissecting human bodies, more often and more thoroughly than older students at civilian institutions dissect frogs, and why sometimes using live bodies from Konoha's prisons is recommended.

And they wouldn't understand the young people that this Academy of death-dealing and shadow-moving produces.

They would look at the two of them and smile, seeing a close friendship, two small children playing games. The truth is nothing so airy. Their games are small training exercises, done in between the heavier training because even exhaustion and trembling limbs will not stop them from improving. They are not friends; they are allies – no childish attachment, but a practical, adult analysis of how they could use each other to mutual benefit.

They use each other to survive, to grow, because they have to.

* * *

_Shinobi have no childhoods. They were young once (they usually never get to grow very old) but they were never children._

_…or so they tell themselves_

* * *

And yet, despite their lives of missions and blades and gentle death-touches – despite considering themselves and being considered as full adults since they were thirteen years old – when he kneels on the muddy ground and cradles her limp body to his thin, still-not-full-grown chest, the wail he raises to the heavens is pure heartbroken child.

* * *

_I am a soul outside of death and birth._  
_I see before me and afterward I see,_  
_O child, O corpse, the live dead face of thee,_  
_Whose life and death are one thing upon earth_  
_Where day kills night and night again kills day_  
_And dies; but where is that Harmonia?_

-Tiresias, Algernon Charles Swinburne

It's kind of angsty, but the ironic thing is that is the intro to a more comedic series. Yesh.


	2. I Wish Tonight

_starlight starbright first star i see tonight  
i wish i may i wish i might  
have the wish i wish tonight_

* * *

He came to them not as a supplicant, but as a beggar - desperate, starving, necessity riding him like a man rides a horse. He had journeyed long and far to reach this long-forgotten temple of long-forgotten gods, and the sufferings of that journey were scribed onto his face - on cheeks drawn hollow with hunger, on staring pale eyes deep-set into hollows stained dark with exhaustion, in scars criss-crossing the ruins of a handsome countenance. The tatters of what had once been sturdy, shinobi-rated clothing - tailor-crafted for a son of a noble clan - hung off a lean body gone too lean from privation as he staggered and stumbled his way up the echoing, cavernous space, once-white fabric now stained a hundred dirty shades of brown and gray.

He collapsed on the steps up to the massive altar, thin chest heaving for breath even as cracked ribs made breathing painful. He coughed once, harshly, bright red splattering on the dark-silver stone as he spat blood. He paid it as little heed as he paid the rest of his injuries, not even bothering to wipe off his mouth as he painfully crawled up the last of the steps, heaving himself to his feet beside the altar.

He removed a small weapon from where he kept it tucked next his heart. Like the shinobi who wielded it, the dagger had seen better days - a once bright blade was chipped and spotted with rust, its edge gone dull. But it was not for lack of trying - it was one of _her _weapons, and he would have killed - he had killed - to keep it safe and with him, because it was the last thing of hers he had to hold on to...

He sawed at his hand with the curving tip, gritting his teeth as the the dulled blade opened a ragged wound on the skin of his palm. He held it over grooves carved deep into the altar, watching with bated breath as the bright red of his blood, deliberately spilled, flowed through the precisely-engineered bloodgrooves in intricate patterns. He opened the cut more, swaying as the loss of blood left him light-headed, but not caring as the blood rushes faster, swirling towards the center...

The spiral at the center of the altar pulsed with light as his blood filled it, and he dropped to his knees as a voice which was a thousand voices echoed inside his head.

* * *

_**# What dost thou require of Us? #**_

He cries out a single name, too overwrought, too tired, too desperate for anything but complete honesty.

_**# What would ye give in return for her? #**_

He swears the sun, the moon and the stars; he offers them his life and his soul for them to make into playthings; he begs them to tell him what he needs to do to win her back, and he will do it. He vows it on everything he can think of, binds himself by the strongest oaths he knows - and the tone of his voice and the wild look in his eye is better promise than all his words.

_**# We accept thy offer, o son of the white-eyed clan. Sacrifice thy lifesblood on this Our Altar, and ye shall have what thou seekest. # **_

Without a second's pause he cuts open his own throat with a dagger that's reverted to its deadly-sharp edge under the blood it had been coated with, slumping over the altar as his life spills out in crimson gushes onto the stone.

And he smiles as he feels power pulsing around him.

"Come back to me, Ten..." he sighs, and dies.

* * *

_**# He shall have her. But the price he needs must pay is none so easy as a life. Is it, O Brother? #**_

: _no its not : _

* * *

And so his soul seeks hers once more. And blazes with bright fierce light when he finds her.

* * *

**AN**

Still not quite humor yet, huh? But next chapter is hopefully less dark than the past two have been. The image in my head as I wrote this bit was of the opening scene of 'Shadows of the Colossus', and the soundtrack would be awesome for that too. All Neji lacks is a horse.


	3. My Little Baby

_hush a bye don't you cry  
go to sleep my little baby  
when you wake, you shall have  
all the pretty little ponies_

* * *

Hizashi Hyuga beamed down at his wife, their hands joined as she moved them to press gently against the smooth curve of her pregnant belly. Hizashi started as he felt movement underneath his hand. "Is that..."

Moira Hyuuga, Japanese-American like her husband, nodded as she winced slightly. "Yes, that's your kicker of a son," she said, smiling a little at the proud-papa glow in her husband's eyes. "Little hellion, little rascal," she crooned at her unborn child. "Settle down, easy, easy...whatever you're looking for, you can do so less bumpingly."

"Looking for?" Hizashi echoed quizzically, his silvery eyes - the eyes that had first caught Moira's attention - darting to his wife. She shrugged, a little self-deprecatingly. "It's just a - a little thing I came up with. He's a very restless baby. I thought once it was like someone reaching for something, not finding it - and - you know - being squirmy until he found it. The idea stuck," she confessed to her little fancy. "And now when he's all - moving - I think of him being in search-mode..." She winced at a particularly enthusiastic kick.

Hizashi laughed, planted a kiss on top of his wife's auburn hair, and then knelt so he could kiss her belly. "Stop beating your mom up, you bratling," he ordered his unborn offspring with mock-sterness.

The little child growing inside the mother's womb did stop kicking.

* * *

When their new neighbors moved next door to them, the Hyugas were pleased to see how much in common they had. Both were sets of young, affluent couples, madly in love with their respective spouses - all four of them being of Asian-American descent - all four intelligent and successful professionals, experts in their chosen fields - and they found themselved admirably and uncannily alike in interests and hobbies. They became firm friends very quickly.

It helped that the Changs were also expecting their first child.

* * *

Their lives dovetailed so neatly that somehow it felt only natural that Hizashi and Jian found themselves running into each other as they rushed their screeching wives into their respective cars, or that they proceeded side-by-side all the way from the recklessly fast car-ride down deserted streets to the hospital, to signing in their wives, to pacing the waiting rooms on opposite and equal circuits as they waited for the nurses and doctors to let them in to join their wives.

And that the first person to see the newborns, aside from the proud parents, were the neighbors (and Hiashi Hyuga, Hizashi's twin brother, but that was only because he was called by Jian. Hizashi had left his cellphone).

Tien kuai Chang and Neji Hyuga entered the world at the same day, and this bond between them was only the first of many.

* * *

**AN**

SO! How many modern!AUs have started off with murders and mysterious god-voices? Because I'm going to be heading into such cliched territory here I decided to at least try and keep the beginning a bit different before I succumb to the clichedness.


	4. Miles to London Town

_How many miles to London-town? Threescore and ten  
Can I make it there by candle-light? Yes, and back again_

* * *

The fact that their parents had become such close friends, the close proximity of their houses, and especially and of course the fact that they were exactly the same age had caused many to prophesy that the two babies would be very close as they grew up. Practically siblings - practically twins.

"For a while, at least," said Hizashi Hyuga.

* * *

The proud parents were absolutely certain that their children were the most adorable, cuddly, sweet, angelic, beautiful children ever to bless the face of the earth (generously allowing that their neighbor's child was ALMOST as adorable, sweet, etc. etc. as their own), as proud papas and mamas had done the world over since children began. Those who saw the children generally agreed.

Neji Hyuga had his father's features and his mother's coloring - her paler skin, and his hair (the nurses had murmured over what a fine, full head of hair he'd been born with) a soft auburn color. But his eyes were the same unusual silver-gray of his father's, which pleased his mother - she'd been dreaming of silver-eyed children since long before Hizashi Hyuga asked her out on a date (but NOT, unknown to her, before Hizashi had been dreaming of children with her auburn hair).

Tenten, as Tien was immediately nicknamed, was a smaller, darker baby, but seemed somehow to take up more space. She was much more wriggly than her birthday-mate (as her mother had once called Neji, and the name stuck) and much louder as well. She had light brown eyes that could have come from either parent, vaguely almond-shaped at the corners, and soft curling tufts of tawny-colored hair.

They looked like the tiny cherubs that baby-food commercials and the like focused on, said one aunt, and everyone - again - agreed.

* * *

They were not only the firstborn in their respective families, they were also the first and only (so far) grandchildren in their families. The babies were coveted like dragon-eggs and the grandparents were over as often as they could be - the grandmothers shamelessly dragging their husbands out to see "the babies" and the grandfathers pretending to grumble but really just as eager.

They regarded each other with wary friendliness, because yes the parents - their own children - were good friends and yes they could bond over being first-time grandparents and ooooh weren't the little ones cute? But deep inside them was the sneaking suspicion that the other wished to usurp their rightful share of grandchild affection because who could resist the cuteness? They regarded each other as allied countries who both wish the same bit of border country under their banners do.

Because, things being as they were, it was impossible to spend large amounts of time with one child and not also spend large amounts with the other. And them both being such cute little moppets (as Moira's mother put it) it was impossible not to grow fond of them.

Tenten was being babysat by Hizashi and Moira one night when Hizashi's mother came to visit. As she watched the two babies sprawl and creep and coo to each other on the soft rubber matting they'd laid down for playtime, there was a smile curving her thin lips. Encouraged, Moira came to sit by her sometimes intimidating mother-in-law, with a plate of iced biscuits and some tea.

Hizashi was sitting in the middle of the floor with the babies, peridodically having to pull Neji back up as his son industriously tried to suck on Tenten's pale blue baby-shoe. Tenten sat there, delighted with the whole situation, clapping and giggling everytime her playmate sprawled towards her shoe.

Moira was just telling Hinamori about how the first full night of sleep either baby had was when Tenten and Meiling were staying over a night (Hizashi and Jian both being out on business trips) and how comforted they were when they napped in the same crib. Hinamori remarked, "Well, I know Neji gets it from his father, but I wonder where the Chang girl learnt it?"

Hizashi froze mid-pull, ignoring Neji's protesting squeal as the baby strained towards the pale blue shoe he was DETERMINED to get into his mouth. "What do you mean, mother?"

Hinamori took a delicate bite of an iced biscuit before answering. "Until you were about four years old, it was impossible to get you and your brother to sleep in separate beds. When your father got you separate rooms you were forever sneaking out of them. Why, I'd wake up in the morning and find you not only in the same room, but sucking on each other's thumb."

Hizashi blushed and stared, Moira hid a smile behind a hand, and Hinamori took a sip of tea. Then the silence was broken by a soft coo from Tenten as she pulled off her shoe and offered it to a delighted Neji, who immediately crammed as much of it into his mouth as he could.


	5. Daddy's Gone a Hunting

_cry baby bunting  
daddy's gone a-hunting  
gone to fetch a rabbit-skin  
to wrap his baby bunting in_

* * *

Neji Hyuga, not quite yet a year old, thought of his world (which was, of course, the only world that mattered) in very simple terms.

There was '_me_', himself, and there was '_me-and-Tenten', _his almost-constant companion, the only other person in the world the same size and shape and design as he was. He had been a bit slow to realize that Tenten was her own existence and not just a part of his own.

Then there were the parents (though of course he didn't yet know that word) - four big people who provided warmth, security and food. The biggest one, with the silver eyes like his, and the one with the dark-red head, were his especially - his papa and his mama, while the two amber-eyed ones belonged to Tenten, but Neji knew that he could rely on them for food/warmth/blankies/pony-rides/cuddles almost as well as he could on his own - and the same for Tenten.

Then there was 'everybody else' - big people who smiled and cooed at him, picked him up and tickled him, picked _Tenten _up and tickled _her _- mostly annoyances interrupting the smooth flow of his days, though Tenten seemed to like them well enough. Sometimes they brought toys and other presents.

But 'everybody else' were only momentary interruptions, for the most part. Some of them he even - tolerated. Like the tall quiet lady who looked a little like papa, and who never tickled him. And, of course, _not-_papa.

Not-papa didn't quite fall in one category or the other. He was NOT papa, but he was very _like _papa. He looked the same. He smelled the same. His voice was the same, especially the same when papa was speaking soft and low and trying not to wake Neji. And he had the same silver eyes. Not-papa was always very quiet when he came to visit, which endeared him to Neji immediately. He liked to crawl to not-papa and be picked up, and to snuggle into crisp shirt-fronts that smelled like air-conditioned coolness added to papa's usual scent. Sometimes he got confused and called not-papa 'papa' and sometimes he called him what he heard papa call him -"Yashi" transforming itself into "Ya'hee" in his lispy baby voice.

Neji regarded not-papa with the same proprietary air with which he regarded all four of the parents. And so he was quite displeased when not-papa stayed away for much longer than had become his habit; and he was positively incensed the day not-papa came back with a tiny, squirming, pale bundle of blankets that was referred to as "Hinata".

* * *

The twin brothers faced each other, each with their firstborn cradled in their arms. Hiashi, who did have copious amounts of baby-sitting experience, still seemed much the more awkward - holding a wriggly, curious baby nephew was somehow much different than holding a brand-new infant baby daughter. Also, he now recalled, he hadn't held baby Neji much until he was about four months old. He had been operating, it seemed, in a state of terror from the moment the nurse had placed the small, soft-voiced human being with miniature versions of his eyes into his arms. He wondered if Hizashi suffered this way.

He wondered if he would stop being afraid he'd break her.

Hizashi watched his brother, standing in front of him with an itty-bitty baby in his arms - surely Neji had never been that small? Nor Tenten, even? - and gave into the urge to grin. Hiashi looked scared and messed up and rather confused - it made him look younger than he was, and more - approachable. (Not, he remembered, that he'd ever really been scared to approach him. Angry and bitter and resentful, yes - but he'd never been _scared _of his twin.)

Neji made a small, questioning noise, and Hizashi planted a soft kiss in his son's sweet-smelling hair. It was really Neji who was responsible for the reconciliation between him and his one-hour-older twin brother - Neji with his innocent curiousity, with his never-ending fascination with his "Ya-hee" - when usually anyone outside his parents and the Changs were treated with wide-eyed babyish solemnity - who had somehow stolen Hiashi's heart and reminded Hizashi his brother had one, who had given the twins a common point of interest to bond over again.

He grinned at Hiashi over Neji's head. He had a wife, a son, and his twin brother back again. And now he had a baby niece...

As if sensing his brother's curiosity, Hiashi smiled shyly - he'd always been the shyer of the two, and unfortunately he'd covered up his shyness with a facade of arrogance and aloofness - and carefully, _very_ carefully - tilted his hold so Hizashi and Neji could gaze upon the sleeping infant.

Neji took one look at her and began to wail loudly.


End file.
